cor·pus /'kôrpəs/
n. pl. cor·po·ra (-pr-)
1. A large collection of writings of a specific kind or on a specific subject.
2. A collection of writings or recorded remarks used for linguistic analysis.
3. The main part of a bodily structure or organ.
//Reviews of art. Art and language. Art and the body.

Monday, 20 February 2017

This is the first major monographic
exhibition of work by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), and the curators, Sarah Milroy
and Ian A C Dejardin, are at pains to emphasise their wish to separate Vanessa
Bell the artist, and Vanessa Bell’s art, from the many stories and dramas
surrounding Vanessa Bell the person, as part of the Bloomsbury Group. Certainly,
her work deserves attention – “Vanessa Bell the painter was as radical as
Virginia Woolf the writer,” wrote the Guardian critic Fiona MacCarthy, when Bell’s
work was shown as part of The Art of Bloomsbury at Tate in 19991 – and she stands strong as an artist in her
own right, not just as the sister of Virginia Woolf, the wife of Clive Bell, or
the lover of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Nevertheless, no matter how hard one
tries – and the curators of this exhibition really have tried – her art cannot
be separated from her life. In fact, even they concede as much in the “At Home”
section of the exhibition, where they portray the complex (or, perhaps one
could argue, remarkably simple, in the way she lived them out) interpenetration
of her roles as mother, wife, lover, sister and artist.

Monday, 13 February 2017

What defines a successful art project? One where the works
all sell? Or one where public opinion is changed and a new form of acceptance
is born? In 1972, the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation launched City Sculpture
Projects, an ambitious endeavour that led to the installation of public
sculptural works by 14 artists in eight cities in England and Wales, for a
period of six months. A towering five-metre-tall King Kong in Birmingham, a
revolving cone in Plymouth, and a conceptual enquiry in Cardiff were among the
commissions realised – but many deemed the project a failure, since none of the
works was acquired by its respective local council, and all were accordingly
removed at the end of the six-month run.

Nevertheless, the project has had a lasting impact. “It was
the moment when sculpture everywhere, but particularly in Britain, became
recalibrated,” says Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry
Moore Institute, Leeds, where an exhibition is currently being held,
commemorating the artistic and social experiment. “What we love more than
anything [at the Institute] is contesting possibilities of sculpture. The
ambition of the 1972 project was to show cutting edge sculpture, outside of
London, at a street level, city-oriented and also viewer-oriented.”

At the time, the project was well-served by the art journal
Studio International, which ran a 14-page special issue, featuring texts by the
artists involved, including some whose commissions were not ultimately
realised. These pages are on display now, alongside cuttings from local
newspapers, photographs, a slide show of footage and maquettes – some remade
especially for this exhibition. Outside the Institute, the colossal King Kong
towers ominously, attracting visitors, firstly for a selfie, and then, with any
luck, through the gallery doors. The artist behind the enormous ape is Nick
Monro, now a reclusive physicist, living in a cottage in Dorset, with no hot
water or electricity. His research into perpetual motion seeks to disprove
Newton’s Third Law. At the time, however, when briefed to produce a
“city-oriented” work, he decided, in a deliberately facetious manner, to make
King Kong, as a “city-disoriented” response.
Built out of fibreglass, the huge creature was scaled up from a tiny maquette,
entirely by using a tape measure and squinting. After his stint in Birmingham, it
lived, for three years, with a used car dealer, before moving to the Lake
District, from where it ventures for the first time for this exhibition.

Liliane Lijn’s six-metre-high revolving steel cone, cut
through with layers of Perspex sheet and neon, was born out of her thinking
around cosmological phenomena. “You can never finish a point,” she says. “It
goes on to infinity.” For this reason, she blunts the point of her cone, making
it parallel to the base and to Earth. The lit up elliptical lines are like
planetary trajectories. Lijn remembers how people kept asking her what her work
was in aid of, not quite grasping the concept that it was “just” art. After
Plymouth, White Koan was shown for six months on the terrace outside the
Hayward Gallery, London, then at the Globe Theatre, before finally being
purchased by the University of Warwick. “It’s very popular now. I don’t want to
be immodest, but it’s really captured the imagination of the students. They
really own it. They have a Koan site on Facebook and on Twitter.”

Garth Evans, whose 12-metre-long steel construct was
intended to speak to Cardiff’s industrial roots, was brave enough to loiter,
the day after installation, and take a microphone around asking people for
their opinion of his work. He made a point not to refer to it as “sculpture” or
a “work of art”, asking only “What do you think of this?” Similarly to Lijn’s experience in Plymouth, the Cardiffians
were struggling to come to terms with what this
actually was, many deeming it “rubbish”. The recordings now form part of the
retrospective exhibition at the HMI and have also been used by Evans since to
create a tongue-in-cheek work in which the sounds emanate from a rubbish bin,
as well as being published in a book and turned into a stage production.

At the time, there was no follow-up to or evaluation of this
ambitious project, and Le Feuvre, and curator, Jon Wood, see that as the role
of this exhibition – albeit some 45 years after the event. This time-lapse,
however, might be seen to attest to the power and lasting legacy of the
project, which, if not an obvious across-the-board success, certainly opened up
discussions about the role – and mere existence – of abstract art in the public
realm. Some may not have seen the point, but the few who did set the ball
rolling. One archive newspaper cutting tells, for example, of the lollipop lady
in Birmingham who donated £1 to a campaign to save King Kong.

“Is part of the power of the legacy of this project because
the sculptures didn’t stay?” ponders Le Feuvre. Had they been seen every day
since, become part of the furniture, as it were, perhaps their potency would
have faded. But by living on solely in the memory of those who witnessed them,
they have gained a certain status, as symbols of change. “Had they been there
longer, people would have grown fonder,” posits Lijn. And this has certainly
been attested to by the response of Warwick students to the potential removal
of White Koan – they went on strike! It will be interesting to see how the
public responds to the removal of King Kong from outside the HMI at the end of
this exhibition. While we often might not notice something until it has gone or
is under threat, this is one public sculpture, which has consistently drawn a
crowd.

Saturday, 11 February 2017

As artists continue to be priced
out of even the farthest reaches of London’s boroughs, and many move down to
places on the south coast, such as Hastings, it seems there is something of a revived
rural exodus to mirror that – or, more correctly, those – of the early- to mid-20th
century, when numerous artistic communities established themselves in the
county of Sussex, with guilds, enclaves and retreats. Exemplifying the many faces
of modernism, these various groupings might, at first glance, seem as different
from one another as chalk and cheese, but biographical and conceptual links can
be made, weaving a deft narrative of the period and its protagonists, and this
is precisely what the sixth annual exhibition, in the successful winter
exhibition programme at Two Temple Place, has achieved. The result, Sussex
Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion, brings together painting, film, sculpture,
furniture, music and photography from more than 30 lenders and nine museums and
galleries. What the curator, Dr Hope
Wolf, describes as a “visual cacophony of styles and media” is contextualised
against the late-19th-century interiors of the London venue, making visible the
very style from which many of the artists included sought to depart.

Thursday, 9 February 2017

Candida Powell-Williams has long seen sculpture and
performance as inseparable. Her current immersive installation at Bosse &
Baum in Peckham, South London, brings together multiple elements, including
both of these, as well as moving image, an artist’s book and even other artists’
editions, produced in an Exquisite Corpse-type manner throughout the duration
of the exhibition.

Her second solo show with the gallery, The Vernacular
History of the Golden Rhubarb grew out of a year-long residency at the British
School in Rome, during which Powell-Williams collected implausible stories,
documented in such a way as to make them believable. She became fascinated,
primarily, by the objects and relics at the heart of these tales, and, in
particular, by tourists’ behaviour in response to them. A performance workshop,
held before the exhibition opened, offered participants the opportunity to
interact with her sculptures, and footage of this has been drawn over and
turned into gifs, which can be viewed by scanning QR codes in the gallery
foyer. It was important for Powell-Williams to incorporate this public
choreography as a work in its own right, rather than just through
documentation. Similarly, she is producing an artist’s book, which, on one
level, will act as an instruction manual for interacting with the exhibition,
but, on another, will be an objet d’art itself.

Referencing well-known and lesser-known touristic
objects from across Rome, represented here in a colourful manner, against a
grey archaeological site backdrop, with de Chirico arches and cross-stitched frescoes
from the Villa of Livia at Palazzo Massimo, the installation invites viewers in
to explore and interpret to the best of their knowledge, adding a sprinkling of
their own imagination to complete and enhance the already bizarre tales.

Powell-Williams showed Studio
International around and explained some of her inspirations.

About Me

Art writer and editor with background as an academic linguist. Assistant Editor at Art Quarterly (Art Fund) and Web Editor for AICA. Former Deputy Editor at State media and Arts Editor at DIVA magazine. Regular contributor to Studio International, Photomonitor, Elephant and the Mail on Sunday. Member of the NUJ, WiJ and AICA. NCTJ qualified.